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That’s Life

‘You & Me,’ by Padgett Powell

Padgett Powell’s sixth novel extends a slender and complicated body of work that over almost 30 years has been occasionally brilliant and just as often stubbornly opaque. “You & Me” is presented by its publisher as a “Southern sendup” of “Waiting for Godot” and is introduced by the author, despite its being a novel, with a piece of stage direction: “Two weirdly agreeable dudes are on a porch in a not upscale neighborhood, apparently within walking distance of a liquor store, talking a lot.”

Except for each other, Powell’s unnamed conversationalists are “essentially alone” and “so d’accordo” in outlook and voice as to be, by the reckoning of one (or the other), “arguably indistinct.” The men come to us with little back story, though we can infer, from appreciative references to R. Crumb and Lily Tomlin — and despite mentions of older “codgers” — that they are roughly of Powell’s generation (60-ish). It seems that at one time they both had wives, and that one of them used to be a writer.

“We come up with things, here and there.” This modest assertion is true, though many of the pair’s musings are only a speculative notch or two above those of the late Andy Rooney. What’s up with children who declare that they’re “going to be corporate lawyers? Plain lawyer wasn’t enough?” A sort of pseudo-­etymology sometimes takes over the proceedings, as when the characters spend a tedious page wondering whether “irrigible” ought to be a word, on the order of “incorrigible.” Powell remains, nonetheless, a taste worth acquiring because some piquant bits are usually stirring inside the pot. To take one example, “You & Me” considers the phrase “It’s the least we can do” by asking this loopily profound question: “If the least you can do is congruent to the most you can do, is it an argument to do it or to not do it?”

Powell’s writing has always been filled with lovely grace notes. This book contains a pretty psalm in praise of the “hindmost hand,” and we get a creek distinguished by its “forlornness, its slightly iridescent stagnation, its unsupport of anything alive that one can see, its dubious mission, its helplessness, its pity, its bravery, the miracle of it withal in even remaining wet — .” Powell’s first and still best-known book, “Edisto,” published in 1984, was dappled with such arresting touches: Joe Frazier’s punching bag “solid as a piece of ocean, as heavy as tide”; the 12-year-old protagonist easing himself off a drugstore stool “like Tarzan’s boy down a chrome vine.” But in that coming-of-age novel, such lyric breezes blew through a narrative that kept moving along. In “You & Me” these cooling drafts occasionally cross the porch, but once they’re gone a reader realizes that nothing else has moved an inch.

The book’s stylistic pastiche, which allows no single element to dominate, contributes to a feeling of inert virtuosity. Good-ol’-boy humor (“How long before we smell like old men?” “Last year, dude”) inflates toward ironic grandiloquence (“Telling a codger . . . to eat a lard-and-hair sandwich does not in the long term constitute a life”) before aphorism comes in (“Failure is to success as water is to land”) accompanied by campiness (“We are not young girls anymore”) as well as the short-circuited cross-talk of the original Vladimir and Estragon: “Let us just sit here.” “Yes.”

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Illustration by Jungyeon Roh

Futility is such a given that the yearnings expressed by each talker feel powerful only when they’re taken out of context, swept off that earthbound porch to be read as free-standing bits: “I would like to go to a place where there are orange fields and sweet young dogs to walk in them with.” Happiness and volition continually float above the characters, out of reach, and any attempt to take refuge in memory is worse than useless. The occasional far-fetched fantasy — adopting a Kenyan boy who “conquers the N.F.L. and then Harvard Medical” — seems permissible.

A broad cultural nostalgia — funny, reactionary and poignant — has pervaded Powell’s recent fiction. This new book laments the decline of common sense and know-how, the receding of a “miraculous day of absent litigation, friendliness among people, and large and plentiful game.” The “trashed-out suburban America” that’s now left is populated by “trivial fat loose cannons” who inspire the characters’ revenge fantasies. The book’s worldview can be summed up by a brilliantly compressive paradox uttered near the end: “I want a newspaper but I don’t really want to read it.”

In his 2000 novel, “Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men,” Powell imagined a modern Southern woman caught between heroic fantasies of the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest and awareness of their impotent delusion. Mrs. Hollingsworth’s story remains hard to figure out on the page, but it is, in whatever small way, a story, unlike the 2009 novel of Powell’s that followed it, “The Interrogative Mood,” a 164-page book made up entirely of questions: “Among these types of fences — picket, chain-link and hogwire — which do you find most attractive? Have you ever worn a feather boa?” This book has its enthusiasts, but most readers are apt to experience it as an endless grilling they’re forced to undergo in some Gitmo of the postmodern mind. At least in “You & Me,” when one voice asks a question, if only about fishing sinkers, another is there to attempt discussion of the matter.

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In this latest novel, Powell treads some very deep water. For long moments his garrulous “Godot” is every bit as dark as the theatrical original. The voices predict: “We really are going to be afraid and we really are going to also refuse to die,” and wonder: “Why can we not live real lives?” The will to live, and to mean something, manifests itself, however hesitantly, when one talker declares to the other: “A child says nothing matters, but it takes an adult to say it doesn’t matter that nothing matters, because it may well be that a lot depends on one’s claiming that nothing matters. I suspect that, if one makes the claim at all, he is saying that something matters.”

But scattershot aperçus do not make a novel. Any number of this book’s offhand insights and hypotheses could be developed into full-blown stories that move instead of meander, that do more than click their way from one YouTube morsel to the next. (“Have you ever seen those clips of flamingos walking in water to a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack and it looks like they are stepping to the beat?”)

Several years ago, Powell told an interviewer that his teacher Donald Barthelme began “swinging back to realism” in his 50s, whereas he himself has “swung so far” in the other direction, grown so used to “thinner and weirder action,” as to become “virtually unpublishable.” Hardly: portions of “You & Me” appeared in Harper’s and McSweeney’s, and the remark about Barthelme was made in The Believer. But narrative and connected action do seem increasingly unwelcome in Powell’s longer works of fiction. The elements that remain — those lyrical breezes; the funny and compelling voices — crave a story line that they can transect, a river, or even just a forlorn creek, that they can ride. In that same interview, Powell said that the young boy in the wonderful “Edisto,” Simons Everson Manigault, was originally going to be called Huck. One still wishes that his gifted creator would come back to the raft.

YOU & ME

By Padgett Powell

194 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $23.99.

Thomas Mallon’s most recent book is a novel, “Watergate.”

A version of this review appears in print on August 5, 2012, on Page BR21 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: That’s Life. Today's Paper|Subscribe